


The Bleached Way

by cainisreallycool



Category: Cultist Simulator (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Lantern, Moth - Freeform, The Bleached Way, the wood - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-13 02:09:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19241674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cainisreallycool/pseuds/cainisreallycool
Summary: A fascinated soul chances upon the light of the Watchman.





	The Bleached Way

**I could sleep in a room without colours: bleach the sheets, whitewash the walls, dye my hair and paint my skin.**

The bucket of paint swings in my hand as I survey the room, its dusty floorboards and sweating walls at once making the space feel desiccated and disquietingly alive. Once when I was younger, my father told me that the walls sweating was a symptom of the house’s sickness; a grand old beast slumped over the hill, exhausted by its fever. It was the privilege of my father to dispense such tales, and my privilege to be able to believe them. Faith was not always such a terrible burden on my family.

In an act of rebellion against the quiet, I stomp into the room. I let my gaze wander, taking in the window, small and shuttered against the chill and damp of the encroaching forest. From inside, I look to the doorway, old wood buckling nobly under the weight of history. I am very nearly brave enough to look upon the bed, its creamy linen untouched and pristine. In an act of wilful levity, I stare down into the pot and shake it, watching the ripples fail to spread in the viscous liquid. Paint is no stranger to a lady of leisure, but paint in such quantities seems almost perverse. The gentle pastels of my easel are notes, smells, auras of beauty that I curate and compose with. This glut of pure white is a cacophony, every possible colour mixing to form a wall of unceasing noise that comes close to overwhelming me.

I snap my gaze up and find myself facing the bed. Had I turned? It is strange, I muse, to see the bed from this angle. I am standing at the end of the frame, my bare legs pressed into the iron hard enough to leave imprints on my skin. My free hand flutters downwards and grasps the black metal, feeling the immovable cold of my mother’s deathbed. If the world was kind, I would have memories to offset this. My mother, the adventuress, the author, the famous wit. But those are not my memories. These are the memories of others, set down in tight curling black type for the whole world. But not for me. The sickness robbed my mother of her colour, of her expression, until her entirety was a stretch of white flesh confined to a white bed, with my two white eyes staring at her through the dense curlicue of darkness that was her entire world. The frame digs into me now, said curlicues contorting and writhing. They will not trap me. I will escape their grasp.

I work with a brush at first, then a roller, and finally my hands, splinters from the floor driving ivory-tipped lances into my fingers as I struggle to scrape my mother on every inch of this mausoleum. When the room is all white, I find that perspective becomes a tricky thing. All one shade in the night streaming from the shutters, the white becomes one plane, the room a single beautiful discord of all that she was or would have been and will never be. Where once the black iron of the frame was a cage for my memories, the bars have been obliterated, streaming into beautiful maddening oneness. Giggling, I upend what remains of the paint over my head and the acrid fumes become overwhelming, swamping my brain with a single note of sensation as the curdled light streams into my eyes, wide open and staring.

The room and I am one now, both blasted into something less than shadow by the incredible light. I feel myself dissolving into the white, my consciousness fading in the face of such inimitable Glory.

In my dream, I find myself in a forest. The white has filled my brain, my skin, and my eyes and ears drip luminous pigment that lights my way as I tread softly into a wood darker than any to be found in the waking world. I am brought here by the white, I understand. That poisonous cacophony filled me to the brim and granted me a glimpse of this, the doors of my mind blasted to splinters by the noise. As I huddle in the undergrowth, I know I must return. Not for this dank, unclean place, but for what lies above. Every part of me aches for it, the glorious dissolution. My bones sing for it, my teeth humming in resonance with that which lies above. I dare not look. Not yet. I must prepare. But for now, I shudder in the cold of the Wood above the world, yearning for the Glory.


End file.
